Marketers don’t just measure fans and growth, but build relationships and connect with fans

Even if, for many, current measures of social media marketing effectiveness are still basic, the goal of such programs has gone far beyond simply gaining followers and �likes,� research shows.
Social marketing software company Awareness surveyed US marketers in July 2012 and found that better customer engagement was a top business objective for social media. Of respondents, 78% cited that as a leading business objective, followed by 51% who said revenue generation was a lead objective. These objectives focus more on relationship building and tying social media back to business results, showing marketers want to go deeper with their social media work than just counting fans.

Yet counting fans was still an important tactic for almost all US marketers (96%). A large percentage of respondents were also measuring traffic to their websites (89%), customer satisfaction (66%) and new customers (62%). Additionally, 60% said they measured leads gained from social media, with another 12% saying they planned to do so. While currently not as popular, 28% of respondents said they were using the customer lifetime value metric, and 22% said they planned to use it in the future.

As marketers track more sophisticated metrics, 66% of respondents said they were investing in increasing their social media presence across different platforms and 56% said they were increasing the frequency of content published, which are still relatively basic strategies. Meanwhile, 50% said they would invest in better integration of social marketing into other marketing initiatives, and 35% said they would work toward better integration of social marketing into the rest of the organization.

Social media is still far from being fully integrated across companies, but there are marketers leading the way, and many others are following suit�or at least saying they plan to in the future.